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Ep 120: The Godfather of Modern Code, Larry DeMar
63 Plays2 years ago
It's Expo 2023 and I got the opportunity to sit down with Larry Demar to talk about the Williams Days. I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did!
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Transcript
Introduction and New Releases
00:00:07
Speaker
Thanks for tuning into loser kid pinball podcast.
00:00:09
Speaker
This is episode one 20.
00:00:11
Speaker
I do not have Scott with me today because this is kind of a random episode and I'll explain it here in a second.
00:00:15
Speaker
But before we get into that, I want to thank our sponsors flipping out pinball Zach and Nicole many.
00:00:20
Speaker
They are awesome.
00:00:21
Speaker
If you're looking for great quality customer service, I highly recommend them and their team.
00:00:26
Speaker
They've done leaps and bounds for me and Scott.
00:00:29
Speaker
Uh, labyrinth was just released.
00:00:31
Speaker
Zach is one of those dealers.
00:00:32
Speaker
So if you want to get barrels of funds, new game labyrinth that stole pinball expos 2023 and raised expectations or Elton John from JJP, which is a beautiful game with it in its own right.
00:00:44
Speaker
We'll be talking about those games next episode.
00:00:46
Speaker
We'll be recording Thursday, but I wanted to hurry and get this episode out.
00:00:49
Speaker
Um, because this episode has been two and a half years in the making.
Interview with Larry DeMar: Early Influences and Career
00:00:54
Speaker
Let me explain.
00:00:55
Speaker
I reached out to a couple of friends in the pinball industry.
00:00:58
Speaker
two and a half years ago about a man that I kept seeing on Williams games and who was kind of a permanent fixture in the tilt, the battle of state pinball documentary.
00:01:09
Speaker
Larry DeMar has done some amazing things and I just don't feel like he gets enough credit.
00:01:17
Speaker
Uh, I've been messaging this man and ever since he left pinball, he started up his own companies.
00:01:21
Speaker
He's worked with other partners.
00:01:23
Speaker
This man is constantly working as you'll hear in this interview.
00:01:26
Speaker
He does roughly
00:01:29
Speaker
70, 80 hours of work a week, easily, not including other responsibilities that he has to do.
00:01:34
Speaker
So it was hard to find some time to track this man down.
00:01:37
Speaker
But you know what?
00:01:38
Speaker
I messaged him that I was going to be in Chicago.
00:01:40
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I knew that's where he lived.
00:01:41
Speaker
I said, hey, I'm going to be at Pinball Expo this year.
00:01:43
Speaker
I don't know if you'll be there, but it'd be nice to sit down and get that interview with you.
00:01:46
Speaker
And he said, you know what?
00:01:47
Speaker
Aim for Thursday and let's do it.
00:01:50
Speaker
So on Monday this past week, the week before Expo started, messages say, hey, we're still good to go for this Thursday.
00:01:58
Speaker
And he said, I'm really sorry, Josh, but my wife has tested positive for COVID.
00:02:02
Speaker
I won't be able to make it.
00:02:04
Speaker
And so I told him that's okay.
00:02:07
Speaker
We'll figure out another time.
00:02:09
Speaker
And I thought that'd be the end of that.
00:02:10
Speaker
But as Expo showed up, I got a message from Larry saying that he would be making it Saturday and that his wife was no longer –
00:02:19
Speaker
had COVID and he, he tested negative for five plus days.
00:02:22
Speaker
And so I said, well, let's go ahead and do that interview.
00:02:25
Speaker
I was actually in the middle of pinball Olympics.
00:02:28
Speaker
So I dropped everything, told Scott Denise seen banger Jay, sorry, I got to get out of here.
00:02:33
Speaker
And I zipped it right back to pinball expo.
00:02:37
Speaker
Thanks to Joel Engelberth and his brother, Jared.
00:02:40
Speaker
And so I got back, I sat down with this man.
00:02:44
Speaker
You're going to hear in this interview, a lot of the games he's already, uh, that he has worked on.
00:02:49
Speaker
I mean, there's too much of a coincidence for me that he's worked on some of the best games that have ever been revered.
00:02:55
Speaker
I'm going to spill him right now.
00:02:57
Speaker
I know I'm going to spill him again here in a second.
00:02:59
Speaker
But...
00:03:01
Speaker
You've got Black Knight.
00:03:02
Speaker
You've got Adam's Family.
00:03:03
Speaker
You've got Twilight Zone, Fun House, Bonsai Run.
00:03:06
Speaker
He was one of the ones that kind of helped with Space Shuttle.
00:03:09
Speaker
You're going to hear all this.
00:03:10
Speaker
It's amazing that this man has, I felt like, helped kept pinball alive during the 80s and 90s and was a pivotal instrument in helping pinball evolve over the years.
00:03:21
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He has been named the godfather of modern code by Josh Sharp, and I think it is very clear and evident when you hear it.
00:03:29
Speaker
Like I said, the reason this is a special episode, I had none of my recording equipment with me.
00:03:33
Speaker
So your YouTube video is not going to be there for Larry, but I do.
00:03:38
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I'm still doing an intro video, obviously, for YouTube.
00:03:41
Speaker
I appreciate those that are doing this, watching it here.
00:03:45
Speaker
And so without further ado, Larry DeMar.
00:03:48
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I am super giddy because the man that I'm sitting with today is an absolute legend.
00:03:55
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Josh Sharp has named him the godfather of modern code.
00:03:59
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If you're looking for a commonality between Twilight Zone, Adam's Family, Fun House, Black Knight, High Speed, World Cup Soccer 94, this man is the man.
00:04:10
Speaker
I've got Larry DeMar with me.
00:04:11
Speaker
How you doing, Larry?
00:04:12
Speaker
I'm doing great.
00:04:13
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Well, that list of games from memory is pretty good.
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They are memorable games.
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Speaker
They're just, they're fantastic.
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I mean, all these games have such an impact on pinball history.
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And it's amazing that you had your hand in all this.
00:04:28
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I just, what made, what brought you to Williams back in the 80s?
00:04:33
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My story starts much further back.
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I grew up in Oak Park, Illinois.
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And my parents were good friends with Alvin Gottlieb and his family.
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And so I started playing pinball machines in his basement and in my best friend's basement.
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My best friend had a Cinderella.
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And in Alvin's basement, we played a game with a very target.
00:04:58
Speaker
I can't remember.
00:05:00
Speaker
I can't remember the, the, the, I don't know.
00:05:03
Speaker
It was a, it was a roto spinner, not a very target.
00:05:06
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Okay.
00:05:07
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And, and I just loved every excuse.
00:05:10
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Pinball was illegal in Chicago.
00:05:13
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And so we were playing pitch and bat games and bowlers and things like that.
00:05:17
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But, but getting to play pinball machines was, was unusual and a treat at the time.
00:05:22
Speaker
And I took that right, you know, my whole life looking for pinballs where I could find them.
00:05:29
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And then when I went to college, I spent a lot of time in the game room or playing the pinballs that were right in the basement of my dorm.
00:05:38
Speaker
That's awesome.
00:05:40
Speaker
So, um,
00:05:42
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going back to 1970, probably 1978, I was a junior or a senior in college and Bally's eight ball came out.
00:05:54
Speaker
Um, and it was one of the first electronic games, you know, we first had a Knight Rider.
00:06:00
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Um, but when eight ball came out, we, we played it a lot.
00:06:04
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I was a pretty good pinball player.
00:06:06
Speaker
And at,
00:06:09
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In that particular game, you collect the balls around the play field and build up the rack of balls.
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And when you fill up the rack of balls, it lights the super bonus light, which represents all the points for a rack.
00:06:24
Speaker
And then you start lighting a second rack.
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And...
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when you fill up that second rack, the software clears it.
00:06:33
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And so your bonus actually goes down on that ball or the next ball, because instead of getting, you know, one rack and 14 balls, one rack and 13 balls, you get one rack and zero balls where you're trying to refill the rack that it stole from you.
00:06:49
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And I was pitching about this, um, you know, late one night when we were playing, um, maybe a little alcohol induced, um,
00:06:59
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And somebody said to me, could you do any better?
00:07:02
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And I was studying computer science at the time.
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And the next day I sent letters to Williams, Bailey and Gottlieb, all of which I had toured in Chicago, maybe a year or two earlier.
00:07:17
Speaker
Um, and long story short, Gottlieb and Bailey never returned my, my letter.
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We reached Alvin Gottlieb later and it never reached him.
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Somebody screened it for him, even though it was personally addressed to Alvin Gottlieb.
00:07:37
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And from Williams, David Poole called me back, called me in for an interview.
00:07:47
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And my hometown was Chicago.
00:07:49
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So it was interesting to come back from Boston to Chicago.
00:07:55
Speaker
But at the same time, I interviewed at Bell Labs, which is kind of like the Google of the time.
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Okay.
00:08:01
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If you were in tech right now, if you're in tech, you know, and you're getting your degree, it would be really cool to go work at a place like Google or Facebook or, you know, any of the really super tech giants.
00:08:13
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And Bell Labs was the Google of the time.
00:08:18
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And so Bell Labs, where I had interviewed also in Chicago, had made me an offer.
00:08:24
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that had me working two days a week, going to school for my master's three days a week, paying me for five days of work and tuition.
00:08:34
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And Williams offered me a little less money and wanted me to come and work for five days.
00:08:40
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So I took the job at Bell in, that would be September of 79.
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And four months into it, I was,
00:08:53
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I actually not for a month.
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And right around the time I took the job in Williams, it offered me the job.
00:08:58
Speaker
Ken Fidesz at Williams.
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And Ken is a legend, really the point person of all the greatness that happened at Williams, along with Mike Stroll, who really had the philosophy of we're going to find really great people.
00:09:18
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We're going to empower them to do what they do.
00:09:23
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We're going to hold our nose and ears a lot from the process and kind of keep our hands off.
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And that was Mike Stroll.
00:09:34
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He was the president at the time and really set the stage for all the greatness of Williams-Balley Midway for the 80s and 90s.
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And Ken Fidesna was the point person who ran the preschool.
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which was all of the people that I worked with making games.
00:09:57
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And he snuck me into the AMOA show in the fall of 79, right when I took the job at Bell.
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And I just couldn't get the game thing out of my head.
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Speaker
And a few months after working at Bell, I called Ken back, said, do you still have a position open?
00:10:22
Speaker
And literally in January of
Innovations at Williams: Solid-State to High Speed
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1980, they were just starting to put together the defender team to make Williams first video game.
00:10:34
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And so, um, I joined, I started, I was, I, I joined Williams and literally upon arriving at Williams, I meet Steve Ritchie and Eugene Jervis.
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Um,
00:10:51
Speaker
And they would become my mentors.
00:10:54
Speaker
And you just can't believe how lucky I was that, that I was shown the ropes and, and under the wing of these two brilliant genius game designers.
00:11:09
Speaker
Um, and I walked into Williams, um, in the middle of a bit of a revolution, um, Mike and Ken and Dave pool,
00:11:20
Speaker
Paul DeSalt was there.
00:11:23
Speaker
Chuck Blake.
00:11:25
Speaker
They were all creating the new Salad State Pinball, which they kind of did in a skunk works off site and then came in and started taking over the operation.
00:11:37
Speaker
And they had to work with a lot of guys, Steve Kordak at the top, who had been in the industry for 50 years and a team of people that
00:11:50
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made games with relays, designing very high-tech electromechanical systems to make these games work.
00:11:59
Speaker
And Steve and Eugene were trying to really move the envelope really quickly, which in that time frame had culminated in firepower, which went from kind of a, you know...
00:12:21
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more of a static experience to more of a, a here's what we're doing over, over a progression and then adding the excitement of multi ball, which hadn't been seen.
00:12:34
Speaker
And, and really the first time of really jazzing up the, the sound and speech, um, in a, in a very quantum leap over Phoenix and flash, which were the stepping stones.
00:12:48
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into let's use technology to be a little, a little crazy and, and more exciting.
00:12:56
Speaker
And, and just to kind of paint the scene of this, um, this rivalry between the old guard and the new guard, when they first added sounds to the games, the pinball machines before solid state were all chimes.
00:13:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:16
Speaker
And all the early solid state games were done with chime units.
00:13:20
Speaker
And they made chimes like pinballs, Knight Rider, and Evel Knievel, and on the Williams side, Grand Prix and Hot Tip.
00:13:30
Speaker
All those early games had chime units.
00:13:33
Speaker
And I think Phoenix might have been the first game with a sound system.
00:13:39
Speaker
And when it was designed, everybody internally had a big war over, no, we can't take the chimes out, or no one will play it, it's not pinball.
00:13:50
Speaker
And they ended up not only putting the chime unit in to the early games that had sound, they actually sent all communication to the soundboard through the solenoids that rang the chimes.
00:14:08
Speaker
so that the system could always throw a switch and use chimes because everyone was going to hate the new sounds.
00:14:16
Speaker
And in the early games, they also put a score motor that just turned around when something would happen just to let you feel the vibration of the old motor that was in the old games.
00:14:31
Speaker
So not only did Steve and Eugene become my mentor, but
00:14:37
Speaker
Um, they were looking at a, at a, at a strong recruit for their side of this new revolution that was taking place in pinball.
00:14:46
Speaker
Is that kind of where high speed starts to come in?
00:14:49
Speaker
Because that seems to be really where the table started to turn with all that.
00:14:53
Speaker
You know, there were some really momentous building block steps.
00:14:58
Speaker
Like I said, I really, um, put Phoenix is the first step, then maybe flash.
00:15:05
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Yeah.
00:15:07
Speaker
then Gorgar, then firepower, and high speed would be the next quantum step in that ladder of great capability being added onto what preceded it.
00:15:25
Speaker
And actually, I probably missed Black Knight in that sequence.
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Speaker
Between, I guess Black Knight was after firepower.
00:15:35
Speaker
That was the first
00:15:37
Speaker
first of two games I worked on with Steve.
00:15:41
Speaker
And when I got to Williams, I was working as an employee at Williams for one year.
00:15:48
Speaker
In that one year, I did more things and more work and more progress and more to show for it than any year I've worked in my career.
00:15:59
Speaker
I'm always working like a dog, okay?
00:16:02
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I work until it's time to go to better...
00:16:06
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or time for some obligation.
00:16:08
Speaker
But, um, in that one year, um, I programmed Scorpion was my, actually my first game was Las Vegas with Roger Sharp and Steve Epstein.
00:16:22
Speaker
Okay.
00:16:22
Speaker
That would have been a great, okay.
00:16:24
Speaker
And I, and I entered the business, um, as a, as a new programmer in pinball and Roger Sharp, I had his book.
00:16:36
Speaker
Okay.
00:16:36
Speaker
I, you know, the, the movie of the man who saved Pinball, I had his book and had read all about this journey and, you know, I was starstruck to have, you know, Steve Ritchie and Eugene Jarvis, you know, okay.
00:16:52
Speaker
They're, they're, they're, they're this gruff guy that, that, you know, designs games and, and Eugene, I thought was really kind of a nerdy guy and, and had no understanding.
00:17:05
Speaker
of what an amazing, amazing creator and inventor he was.
00:17:12
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But all of a sudden, hearing you're gonna meet Roger Sharp and he and Steve have drawn a game on a napkin.
00:17:21
Speaker
Barry Osler drew it out and they wanted me to be the programmer of this game.
00:17:28
Speaker
And so Roger and Steve were both in New York City at the time.
00:17:33
Speaker
And they visit Chicago on a weekend and the place is closed.
00:17:38
Speaker
And I come in on the weekend and spend time going over the game and talking about rules and the like.
00:17:44
Speaker
And then for lunch, we went out to Chicago Game Company, which was a local arcade on Western Avenue, where we often tested games and we played some pinball there.
00:17:56
Speaker
And I was a really good pinball player in the time, and I'm still a pretty good pinball player today.
00:18:05
Speaker
And I, of course, wanted to impress Roger, and I couldn't hit anything but a rubber post on any ball of any game that I played with him that day.
00:18:16
Speaker
I remember specifically we were playing Big Game and Cheetah, two games.
00:18:22
Speaker
games from Stern at the time that were the medium-sized wide bodies.
00:18:28
Speaker
And they were putting the games through their paces, and I literally could not hit a shot in five or six games that we played.
00:18:42
Speaker
And so Roger along the way not only came to know my pinball playing abilities, but he and I played as a doubles team in the early IFPA tournaments and did really, really well.
00:18:58
Speaker
So that was it.
00:19:03
Speaker
So Las Vegas was developed a little bit and was put on the shelf.
00:19:11
Speaker
It was resurrected as Jet Orbit.
00:19:15
Speaker
And the names were based on three bank of drop targets on the left, five bank of drop targets on the right, Las Vegas, Jet Orbit.
00:19:25
Speaker
And finally was produced as Barakora, which put two R's on the third target to make the nine letters go on the eight targets, which always struck me as crazy because they just could have spelled Barakora with one R. Yes.
00:19:40
Speaker
And it eventually came out several years after I first started on that game.
00:19:50
Speaker
And then I did Scorpion, which was the second multi-ball game after Firepower on a wide body with a mediocre playfield layout.
00:20:01
Speaker
And I got to tinker with some multitasking ideas and
00:20:06
Speaker
that Eugene didn't do in Firepower that I thought we could, we were always talking about multitasking where different processes could do different things.
00:20:18
Speaker
And so I played with some of that on Scorpion.
00:20:22
Speaker
And after having done a full game, it was time to revamp the whole Williams operating system.
00:20:32
Speaker
It had been done a couple of years earlier and pinball was evolving and it really needed more capabilities.
00:20:39
Speaker
And it was a project that I
Transition to Video Games and Industry Changes
00:20:42
Speaker
talked about with Ken and Steve, but I didn't know at the time, but the management wasn't sure they should trust the guy that just got out of school and had no experience to try and develop a new system, which at the time you had to design it, develop it.
00:21:00
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and burn it into ROMs in mass quantities, and it couldn't change from game to game.
00:21:05
Speaker
Things couldn't be added and bugs couldn't be fixed because EPROMs were too expensive at the time.
00:21:14
Speaker
And so after doing the first game successfully, which also let me learn every nook and cranny of the old system, they let me do the new system.
00:21:25
Speaker
And so all at once,
00:21:28
Speaker
And Steve tagged me as programmer for Black Knight.
00:21:33
Speaker
And I was helping Eugene get the whole video game thing started.
00:21:37
Speaker
So all at once, I was working in two buildings on the new operating system, on the Black Knight pinball machine, and on early work on the software that would be the base system for Defenders.
00:21:52
Speaker
And, um, Steve is a perfectionist and generally take several iterations of white woods to develop a game.
00:22:04
Speaker
And so his time between his white wood passes on his game gave me a lot of time to work on the new pinball system and on the defender stuff.
00:22:16
Speaker
And so in the first year I did Whitewoods of Las Vegas, Scorpion, the new Pinball operating system, Black Knight, Jungle Lord, some base work on Defender's operating system, some in-between work to develop for enemy development on Defender,
00:22:38
Speaker
and the crunch work before the show to put it in a track mode high score table and lead the technical team to get chips burnt so we could put them in the games at the show at AMOA.
00:22:53
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No wonder you work 70, 80 hours.
00:22:55
Speaker
You've been doing it since you got out of the gate.
00:22:58
Speaker
So that was it.
00:23:01
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And following the success we had with Defender,
00:23:06
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Williams opened up a bigger engineering facility on Kedzie Avenue, about a mile and a half from the California facility that was the pinball factory where we all worked, and moved all the video game development there.
00:23:23
Speaker
And they hired a bunch of programmers.
00:23:27
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They built out a bunch of little tiny offices, and they had a terrible HVAC system,
00:23:34
Speaker
that caused us to all have to keep our doors open.
00:23:38
Speaker
And some of us, and I was the worst violator, blasting a radio while I worked because this was before AirPods and great use of headphones were a thing.
00:23:53
Speaker
And between the HVAC and the noise, Eugene and I, who had talked about leaving to start our own company,
00:24:03
Speaker
Okay, just one day it had enough working at this new building that we said, let's give it a try.
00:24:13
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And so we walked into Mike Stroll, who was the president of the company.
00:24:20
Speaker
And said to him, we're leaving.
00:24:23
Speaker
What do you mean you're leaving?
00:24:24
Speaker
We're going to go off and try and make games on our own.
00:24:28
Speaker
Part of it, actually, most of it was just that the game designers were not recognized as valuable talent.
00:24:40
Speaker
And even though Mike had, you know, paid more than other companies, we were
00:24:49
Speaker
the make it or break it factor for, you know, millions or tens of millions of dollars of business.
00:24:57
Speaker
And we're not being compensated as entrepreneurs.
00:25:01
Speaker
And so we decided we would go out on our own, make games and then license them to companies that would buy them from us.
00:25:10
Speaker
Okay.
00:25:13
Speaker
And Mike said, Mike tried to talk us out of it.
00:25:16
Speaker
There were some financial offers at the time, and we had kind of decided, we kind of decided this is what we were going to do.
00:25:25
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And Mike was, before you do anything, I want you to come to New York with me, and let's talk about this some more.
00:25:35
Speaker
And he flew Eugene and I first class to New York,
00:25:40
Speaker
And we met with Luna Castro, who was the chairman of the company at the time and controlled the company.
00:25:49
Speaker
And he and Mike, at the end of the day, said, if you're going to do this on your own, I want you doing it for me.
00:25:57
Speaker
And so we made a deal to go on our own and have Williams support us with some of the tech.
00:26:06
Speaker
They gave us an advance against royalties on our games and made a royalty deal that we liked the one we would have made with any company.
00:26:16
Speaker
And they said they wanted another game in six months.
00:26:23
Speaker
And that was key because a production line had been ramped up for defenders and they needed to keep the people in the factory working and fluent at making games.
00:26:35
Speaker
And
00:26:36
Speaker
my response was the only game you can have in six months is super defender.
00:26:41
Speaker
And so that is how stargate was born.
00:26:44
Speaker
Gotcha.
00:26:45
Speaker
And so they lent us one, the development systems were 30, $40,000 computers called exercisers made by Motorola.
00:26:57
Speaker
And these, they, they let us use, even though there were two of us programming the game, they let us use one.
00:27:03
Speaker
We had a deadline of six months.
00:27:05
Speaker
to have the game done.
00:27:07
Speaker
And so Eugene and I worked around the clock in the spare bedroom of my apartment and we created Stargate in six months, after which we got our own facility, came up with a cheaper, better technology for doing the development and did Robotron and Blaster as vid kits.
00:27:33
Speaker
And so that, that was, that was the early days and video, the, we, we, after getting my big start in pinball, which is my bigger passion, um, video really took over.
00:27:48
Speaker
Um, and then in 83, um, in 83, the, I, which crashed first, the home games or the, or the, uh,
00:28:01
Speaker
I want to say home games, Dad.
00:28:04
Speaker
Okay, there was a home game crash.
00:28:07
Speaker
In one order, one year after the other, the home games crashed and the video games crashed.
00:28:12
Speaker
And I was looking for my next gig at the time.
00:28:18
Speaker
Eugene left vid kids, left Chicago, moved back to California, got his master's at Stanford.
00:28:25
Speaker
And I was pittering around with some ideas to try to do on my own a home version of Wheel of Fortune for the computers that were out there.
00:28:38
Speaker
And Joe Kamenco was at Williams trying to get his way into engineering.
00:28:43
Speaker
He was with the sales department and the engineering group didn't really want him working with them.
00:28:52
Speaker
And he conned me into coming back with him
00:28:56
Speaker
in trying to make a pinball machine with them.
00:28:58
Speaker
And it's really a kind of a landmark point because Joe went to NASA and got the license for space shuttle.
00:29:09
Speaker
Okay.
00:29:10
Speaker
Okay.
00:29:10
Speaker
And he can, he talked to Barry and got Barry to pull out a bunch of play fields.
00:29:16
Speaker
And Joe and I went in and we looked at a bunch of his old games, Barry Osler, such a nice guy.
00:29:23
Speaker
And he was so prolific.
00:29:26
Speaker
Okay, the bigger, you know, celebrity designers in the business, you know, did a game a year when they were good and sometimes a game every two years when it was taking longer, either because it was such a spectacular set of things they were doing or just because things were going slowly for different reasons or writer's block.
00:29:56
Speaker
Okay, I've seen writer's block where they're working on something and it's just not looking like they want it to be in there.
00:30:05
Speaker
One thing about the best designers, developers, producers, programmers, okay, they are almost all perfectionists, but every one of them is insecure.
00:30:17
Speaker
And so there is a fear at all times that there's not enough.
00:30:22
Speaker
It's not good enough.
00:30:24
Speaker
It's not going to be.
00:30:26
Speaker
you know, just loved and revered, it's only going to be good.
00:30:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:31
Speaker
And so that causes, that causes, that can cause great delay of, of time when, when these people, you know, aren't sure and don't feel it when they're doing it.
00:30:50
Speaker
The super mega designers that we all know and love are,
00:30:56
Speaker
would have a rate of putting out games of one a year or maybe one every two years if things didn't go well.
00:31:06
Speaker
And this is due to this perfectionism married with insecurity.
00:31:14
Speaker
And Barry was a prolific play field production machine.
00:31:21
Speaker
Okay.
00:31:21
Speaker
He, he, he could draw a new complete play field every week.
00:31:27
Speaker
And some of them, you know, some of them were magnificent, you know, just the most amazing games ever.
00:31:35
Speaker
And some of them were less magnificent and, um,
00:31:40
Speaker
In this process, he had a pile of drawings that were just things that he drew that never, that nothing ever happened.
00:31:47
Speaker
Nothing was ever done with them.
00:31:50
Speaker
And Joe and I met with Barry and he started pulling out all his old play fields and he kind of, you know, and Joe was, was kind of being the point person and Joe had no experience making pinball machines.
00:32:06
Speaker
He had done some video game design for Williams out of his studio in Atlanta before joining the company.
00:32:15
Speaker
And he kind of, you know, was looking at things and we'll take this out of this game and the top of this one and the bottom of that one, and we'll put it together and we'll make a space shuttle game.
00:32:27
Speaker
And he sold it to the powers that be, and I agreed to come in four days a week to program it.
00:32:33
Speaker
And so that's what got me...
00:32:36
Speaker
from doing video games, you know, back into the pinball circuit.
00:32:40
Speaker
Um, and I did, um, work on that game and, and it, uh, pinball was, was, was really in the gutter in 82, 83.
00:32:54
Speaker
And this was in 1984.
00:32:58
Speaker
And the company was only a pinball company
Reviving Pinball: Successes and Challenges
00:33:01
Speaker
at this time.
00:33:01
Speaker
They, they were at, you know, they were done with video games, video games,
00:33:06
Speaker
Maybe not.
00:33:07
Speaker
Maybe they were working on Star Rider.
00:33:10
Speaker
Star Rider was their Laserdisc game.
00:33:13
Speaker
Laserdisc kind of finished off video games where video games were waning.
00:33:22
Speaker
Laserdisc was a shiny thing.
00:33:25
Speaker
Dragon's Lair was a monster hit.
00:33:29
Speaker
And other games had some success to a lesser extent.
00:33:34
Speaker
and Williams put all of their video resources in the star rider, they had kept pinball on the back burner with a small team making a very small number of games, but they kept all the know-how and all of the, the muscle memory of making them and producing them alive, you know, in 82 and 83.
00:33:58
Speaker
But,
00:34:02
Speaker
It was, it was, it was not a business and, and they weren't going to make money in video games and, um, firepower to done by Mark Ritchie just before this period had shown some spark of more interest in more game sales.
00:34:25
Speaker
And by the time we were heading to the show in 84 with space shuttle,
00:34:31
Speaker
We didn't know it, but Luna Castro had put down an ultimatum.
00:34:35
Speaker
You need to get 5,000 orders for the game or we're shutting the whole company down.
00:34:42
Speaker
And so this game went to the show.
00:34:44
Speaker
I think they got 7,000 orders.
00:34:45
Speaker
The game was a hit.
00:34:51
Speaker
And then it was followed very quickly by Comet, a brilliant Barry Osler, Python, Bill Futsenreiter game.
00:34:59
Speaker
And then I came and worked with Steve on high speed, and that followed Comet.
00:35:07
Speaker
So that really was sort of an exponential or hockey stick type of curve from going out of business to pinball is really something again.
00:35:21
Speaker
Well, and I've kind of followed some of the stuff you've done in the past too, and it seemed like high speed was kind of the catalyst for more people getting into pinball.
00:35:30
Speaker
I know a lot of people, if I remember correctly, that's kind of how Pat Lawler came along too, is he played high speed a lot and loved it.
00:35:36
Speaker
And I know that even like Keith Owen nowadays, that's one of his games he attributes, like high speed just captures you and captures the imagination, but it also was just such a fast and furious game.
00:35:48
Speaker
It kind of turned pinball on its head at that point.
00:35:51
Speaker
And so I guess the question I'm asking is, did you see that coming with high speed?
00:35:55
Speaker
Because like you said, pinball was dying and all of a sudden it just was an uptick.
00:36:00
Speaker
So how did you guys use that momentum to your advantage?
00:36:06
Speaker
It's the combination of a lot of things.
00:36:08
Speaker
It's really interesting you mentioned Keith Elwin because you and I just met on the expo floor at Keith Elwin's masterpiece, Godzilla.
00:36:17
Speaker
Yes.
00:36:19
Speaker
And so my hats off to him for creating that game.
00:36:24
Speaker
What a wonderful, wonderful game.
00:36:30
Speaker
It was the convergence of a whole bunch of things at once that was also benefited from the amount of time Steve spent perfecting that game.
00:36:45
Speaker
That game we probably worked on
00:36:49
Speaker
a year and a half, maybe longer.
00:36:59
Speaker
And we were adding on to the things that we had done in the previous several games, starting with Black Knights.
00:37:09
Speaker
The new operating system in Black Knight supported multi-threaded programming.
00:37:14
Speaker
So the biggest thing we could gain out of that was all kinds of use of time.
00:37:20
Speaker
And we had mystery shot timers.
00:37:24
Speaker
We had time drop targets.
00:37:25
Speaker
We had a timed bonus round at the end of the game.
00:37:30
Speaker
And when it came time for high speed,
00:37:38
Speaker
We first, over a giant, giant internal fight, okay, ended up getting the alpha-numeric displays on the game.
00:37:49
Speaker
Nice.
00:37:49
Speaker
Okay, that was the first Williams pinball that had the alpha-numeric displays.
00:37:55
Speaker
Gottlieb actually beat us with those on a couple of games earlier.
00:38:05
Speaker
Gottlieb, while we were working on high speed, developed a game called rock.
00:38:11
Speaker
And rock had rock and roll instead of a synthesized space age sound going in the background.
00:38:21
Speaker
They actually were playing music.
00:38:25
Speaker
And the master of the music was Dave Thiel, who I revere.
00:38:34
Speaker
Yes.
00:38:37
Speaker
And I ran into him somewhere while we were working at high speed, and he explained how they did it without having the processing power and memory that was needed to really do music and pinballs.
00:38:52
Speaker
And he said, you know, they sampled one note.
00:38:55
Speaker
a C and then they played the C back at different speeds to make it other notes.
00:39:01
Speaker
So they, so they just had, you know, we're not talking megabytes, we're talking kilobytes.
00:39:06
Speaker
We're talking about, you know, a 2k or a 4k sample, which filled an EEPROM or two.
00:39:12
Speaker
And we only had two or three EEPROMs in the game.
00:39:15
Speaker
They sampled one note and they use software to make it play music.
00:39:20
Speaker
And I come back into Williams and I talked to Bill Perraud,
00:39:24
Speaker
who worked with Eugene Jarvis on the sound for high speed and talked to Steve about it.
00:39:30
Speaker
And we decided we're going to do that too.
00:39:35
Speaker
And the note that got sampled was Steve bringing in his guitar.
00:39:40
Speaker
Steve Rich is a great guitar player.
00:39:43
Speaker
And he composed...
00:39:45
Speaker
the music, the theme that played during high speed multiball, he composed that whole riff and played it on his guitar, but he played one note for Bill Perot and Bill Perot played the exact game that David Thiel had done in rock, which if I hadn't run into him and him being so proud to explain, you know, his cool technical trick, um,
00:40:15
Speaker
We would have waited until probably Pinbot, which finally had a Yamaha synthesizer, was the first game where we actually put a synthesizer in a game, hired our first musician to do sound.
00:40:31
Speaker
Eugene was an ad hoc musician.
00:40:38
Speaker
He played keyboard with Steve Ritchie, who played...
00:40:43
Speaker
the electric guitar, Mark Ritchie played the bass guitar, and they had a band that played in Steve's basement or in the vid kid's office until our landlord said that couldn't go any longer.
00:40:56
Speaker
So Bill sampled the notes, Steve composed the music.
00:41:02
Speaker
We laid it into the game and it was a cacophony because I had already done the entire game
00:41:12
Speaker
with sound calls and choreograph sound.
00:41:16
Speaker
Um, and we were near the end of the game.
00:41:18
Speaker
I mean, this wasn't like we, we had planned to do high speed with music in it.
00:41:23
Speaker
Um, and so we brainstormed over it and decided we would just put drums during the main play and, and Bill Pratt sampled a cymbal hit me, sampled a drum hit.
00:41:38
Speaker
And he, again, uh, you know,
00:41:41
Speaker
created some drum riffs and that was the background of the game so that all the sounds that were already done and sounded good could play over the drums and not clash with the music.
00:41:52
Speaker
And then during multival, we took all of the dumb sounds and just made them a little boop, boop.
00:41:59
Speaker
We just, we took them, dumbed them down so that the music could play in the sounds except for award sounds.
00:42:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:06
Speaker
Um,
00:42:07
Speaker
wouldn't be clashing with the music.
00:42:09
Speaker
It was interesting.
00:42:10
Speaker
I'm watching Steve's Elton John today at expo, um, which you can't get to play.
00:42:16
Speaker
Cause there's a line of 10 people at each of the three games here, but I'm watching the game and they keep ducking the music to let you hear a sound or hear a voice cue.
00:42:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:28
Speaker
And so you've got these wonderful Elton John tunes playing and they keep ducking down to, so they're shelving the same problem in a different manner.
00:42:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:39
Speaker
Which it works.
00:42:42
Speaker
It works, but it's kind of like, you know, writing graffiti on a Picasso to me, hearing Elton John's music, keep getting ducked to, to let the game,
00:42:53
Speaker
do what it has to in communicating sound or instructions.
00:42:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:01
Speaker
So we got the alphanumeric displays in high speed.
00:43:06
Speaker
We, at the end, get sound, which again is, is just works great.
00:43:11
Speaker
And I got to tell the alphanumeric story a little bit first.
00:43:17
Speaker
Yeah, go for it.
00:43:19
Speaker
I've told this many times and I'm sure it's out there, but,
00:43:25
Speaker
I envy what I am seeing at Expo right now because they are building these games with no expenses spared and then selling them with a real profit margin for buyers in their homes that want these as trophies, collectible trophies that they love.
00:43:48
Speaker
We were in a business where
00:43:51
Speaker
The games were bought by people that had to put them on a location and get quarters put in them and make a profit.
00:43:59
Speaker
And the price that we could charge was really limited to around $2,000.
00:44:05
Speaker
And we couldn't raise the price because we put something cool in a game.
00:44:12
Speaker
That's what the market would pay.
00:44:16
Speaker
And it went up at the very end into the 2000s.
00:44:19
Speaker
but probably during the time of high speed, it was like 1895 was what we sold a high speed for.
00:44:25
Speaker
Wow.
00:44:27
Speaker
And putting in these alphanumeric displays, which Steve, you know, Steve, like we got to have these.
00:44:34
Speaker
And, and we got the company that made the displays that was cherry and displays Inc were the two display companies.
00:44:42
Speaker
We got them to make prototypes and they were going to add, you know,
00:44:49
Speaker
I don't know, maybe $50, maybe $75, $100.
00:44:52
Speaker
I don't remember what it was at the time, but they were going to add a significant cost that we really weren't in a good position to pass on.
00:45:01
Speaker
There were three or four pinball companies at the time.
00:45:05
Speaker
They were all high volume, very competitive.
00:45:08
Speaker
And if you raised your price, you pushed a lot of business to the other company.
00:45:15
Speaker
So Steve and I are lobbying for it and I've got them in the game in a prototype and I'm doing all kinds of different effects and showing how we would put the initials of the players.
00:45:26
Speaker
And I dreamed up a feature to make the displays worthwhile.
00:45:33
Speaker
I said, you know, we're going to put a jackpot in the game and we're going to show with the word jackpot, the jackpot growing.
00:45:41
Speaker
And we'd do it during multi-ball, and it would be progressive where it would build and build, and whoever hit the jackpot, which was going to be a really hard thing to do, would collect it all, and it would reset.
00:45:52
Speaker
Okay.
00:45:54
Speaker
And so we've mocked it up.
00:45:56
Speaker
We're showing this, and to management, it was insurmountable to add this much cost to the games.
00:46:05
Speaker
And there's a whole story of the designers can tell you
00:46:10
Speaker
about taking drop targets out and taking mechanisms out.
00:46:19
Speaker
And it just wasn't solvable.
00:46:22
Speaker
And the mechanism story is fun because drop targets are very expensive and our drop targets for a while were very unreliable.
00:46:31
Speaker
So they always got pulled out at the 11th hour, starting with firepower, where firepower was a drop target game.
00:46:38
Speaker
it played so much better with drop targets.
00:46:42
Speaker
And because of costs and because of mostly because of reliability, Mike Stroll broke Steve and Eugene's heart at the 11th hour, turning them into touch targets, into bullseyes.
00:46:58
Speaker
And later on, designers would all put drop targets in their prototypes and
00:47:03
Speaker
Okay, not because they ever planned to use them, but as a way when they were told their games were too expensive, okay, I'll take my drop targets out.
00:47:13
Speaker
And I think it's still happening to this day, but not to the point where you see these modern games are beautiful, they are built up, and they are shoveling money into them.
00:47:31
Speaker
for a market that wants it and will pay for it.
00:47:36
Speaker
And the side effect is it's created a real margin.
00:47:40
Speaker
Instead of making, you know, a few hundred dollars or three, $400 on a game, they're making thousands for each game with the markup.
00:47:50
Speaker
And that allows them to start and stop the lines and just make as many as people want whenever they want them.
00:47:56
Speaker
We had this whole problem
00:47:59
Speaker
that the line could never stop because we'd have to lay off everybody and we would lose ability and know how.
00:48:09
Speaker
So we are in the office that Stephen and I are working on with Ken Fidesna.
00:48:16
Speaker
We're showing the demo and he's like, that's all wonderful.
00:48:21
Speaker
We can't afford them for the games.
00:48:23
Speaker
And yeah,
00:48:25
Speaker
it went back and forth and I, I got really angry and literally I was standing on one side of the high speed prototype and kind of was on the other side and I pushed the game over, which would have, you know, knocked him to the floor or, or whatever, but he caught it and stood it back up.
00:48:45
Speaker
It also might've set the game development back for two or three months if that thing fell in and went to splinters.
00:48:54
Speaker
Um,
00:48:55
Speaker
Like many things in life, we ended up with a compromise.
00:49:00
Speaker
We put the alphanumerics on the top two displays, left the cheaper numeric displays on the bottom two.
00:49:06
Speaker
And that's how peace was made.
00:49:09
Speaker
between the factions.
00:49:12
Speaker
It let us do a whole test and setting system where you could see what, you know, the settings in the game.
00:49:18
Speaker
You just have to go to a manual, you know, number three is number of balls.
00:49:22
Speaker
Number four is your tilt warnings.
00:49:23
Speaker
Number five, maximum credits.
00:49:27
Speaker
And so this brought in a whole new era there.
00:49:32
Speaker
But it let us communicate the features.
00:49:34
Speaker
It let us put in things like this jackpot feature in a discernible way.
00:49:39
Speaker
Um, and it really was, was a huge step.
00:49:43
Speaker
Um, high speed really is said to be the first game where you were playing through a story and, and getting, getting those displays in there really helped us tell the story and tell you what was going on.
00:49:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:59
Speaker
Um, so, so that's, uh, and the, the, the, um,
00:50:08
Speaker
Other big feature.
00:50:10
Speaker
Firepower started the feature was multiball.
00:50:15
Speaker
Starting in Scorpion and then Black Knight.
00:50:21
Speaker
It's let's make multiball an opportunity.
00:50:24
Speaker
Let's not just...
00:50:25
Speaker
put the balls out there and have you hit things.
00:50:29
Speaker
Let's have you make it an opportunity.
00:50:31
Speaker
In Black Knight, it was double and triple scoring.
00:50:35
Speaker
In Scorpion, it was however long you kept them in play, you got a bonus and could light extra ball and special.
00:50:42
Speaker
And then Black Knight, it was do a very difficult feat while all these balls are kind of messing you up and you'll be really rewarded.
00:50:54
Speaker
And that has been the foundation of game design since 1986.
00:50:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:01
Speaker
The games that, you know, I just got done playing Godzilla.
00:51:05
Speaker
And I, you know, made lock shots for a multiball, which goes all the way back to firepower or to games like Fireball and Wiggler and 4 million BC back in the 70s.
00:51:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:22
Speaker
Lock balls and then start multi-ball.
00:51:25
Speaker
And then shoot shots for jackpots while you've got the three balls in place.
00:51:28
Speaker
So that's kind of a thing that started with high speed and moved forward.
00:51:36
Speaker
And then the whole storytelling aspect.
00:51:42
Speaker
That's amazing.
00:51:45
Speaker
Sorry, my mind's reeling because that is a ton of information.
00:51:49
Speaker
It's amazing.
00:51:51
Speaker
So...
00:51:52
Speaker
I'm trying to think.
00:51:53
Speaker
I don't know the timeline super well between high speed.
00:51:56
Speaker
And then I know that Pat Lawler came in kind of the late eighties, but if I understand correctly, did you kind of bring him in and work after hours with him on bonsai run to kind of, I, I, I know that you had some, some way of bringing him in.
00:52:10
Speaker
I just don't know what the time is from high speed to then.
00:52:13
Speaker
Those are all relevant to the story.
00:52:17
Speaker
Okay.
00:52:18
Speaker
Um,
00:52:22
Speaker
After high speed finished, I was a little burnt out.
00:52:24
Speaker
I was in there as a contractor.
00:52:26
Speaker
I never went back to work for Williams.
00:52:28
Speaker
I did space shuttle and high speed on contract.
00:52:32
Speaker
I was a little burnt out and sort of, you know, not doing a lot.
00:52:40
Speaker
Steve had me penciled in for his next game, which at the time was called F-111.
00:52:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:48
Speaker
And Paul DeSalt,
00:52:51
Speaker
was the software manager at Williams.
00:52:54
Speaker
He programmed games like Phoenix, like Blackout, like Alien Poker.
00:53:01
Speaker
And he was my first boss.
00:53:05
Speaker
Okay, he was running the software department.
00:53:06
Speaker
I worked for him.
00:53:09
Speaker
And he had left Williams after everything was dying in the early 80s.
00:53:19
Speaker
and was working in a company called NuvaTech.
00:53:22
Speaker
And NuvaTech was developing a bowling system, a new high-tech, you know, cutting-edge bowling system for Brunswick that actually operated the pin setters and, you know, had the computer displays and kept score.
00:53:38
Speaker
This was the first system that showed, you know, graphics and animations for when you did things that were successful.
00:53:47
Speaker
Pat Lawler was programming the pin setter.
00:53:50
Speaker
Pat had come from Dave Nutting where he had worked on some of the Bally video games, the Midway video games of the early 80s.
00:54:02
Speaker
Richard and Elaine Ditton, who later did Golden Tee Golf, created incredible technologies and have now gone on to be, you know,
00:54:15
Speaker
major force in the slot machine industry.
00:54:21
Speaker
They were working on the game programming of the system.
00:54:26
Speaker
Paul was managing the whole product and they needed help with the operating system in this platform.
00:54:37
Speaker
And he brought me in for a two-month project to come in and rewrite the operating system
00:54:46
Speaker
for this system.
00:54:49
Speaker
So I met Pat, Richard, and Elaine all working under Paul at Nuvitac.
00:54:58
Speaker
And Pat tells the stories how we used to go out to lunch every day and play high speed.
00:55:06
Speaker
And he had a thing for pinball and had designed a
00:55:13
Speaker
an early prototype for a game that was going to be called Wreck-N-Ball out in his barn out in Marengo, Illinois.
00:55:21
Speaker
Pat lives on a farm.
00:55:25
Speaker
He's not a farmer, but he and his wife, Patricia, live on five acres, I think it is, out in Marengo, Illinois.
00:55:35
Speaker
And he had come up with the idea for a vertical play field to go along with a horizontal.
00:55:43
Speaker
playfield and had designed the bottom playfield and put a couple of flippers on a top playfield and had a concept of how we would connect them.
00:55:55
Speaker
And he brought me out there and said, I want to show you something.
00:55:58
Speaker
And he showed it to me.
00:56:01
Speaker
And I thought it was interesting enough and a cool enough idea that I decided let's get together.
00:56:10
Speaker
Let's get a patent on this
00:56:13
Speaker
new revolutionary thing that's going to be the new pinball blockbuster.
00:56:18
Speaker
We know how that played out.
00:56:20
Speaker
And let's make the game and then see if we can sell it to Williams.
00:56:26
Speaker
So I am in awe at all of the home development resources and that in 2023, you can buy all the parts and buy an electronic system with a complete software package.
00:56:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:56:43
Speaker
Okay.
00:56:44
Speaker
And make your own pinball machine.
00:56:46
Speaker
And lots of people, lots of people are doing it and it's incredible.
00:56:49
Speaker
Yep.
00:56:51
Speaker
Back in, in that day, there were, there was nothing.
00:56:58
Speaker
And so not only did to do this, did we need to get the existing Williams electronics boards, which I knew a couple of things about to develop a program for.
00:57:11
Speaker
We bought a road Kings and,
00:57:14
Speaker
new in the box so we could get the, the hardware boards.
00:57:19
Speaker
And so we could get a whole harness.
00:57:23
Speaker
It wasn't for our game, but it was a whole harness with all the wire colors in it that we could use to try and wire up our prototype game.
00:57:33
Speaker
And then, um,
00:57:40
Speaker
I'm trying to think what happened in the development arena.
00:57:43
Speaker
I think I, I think I talked to Williams and they lent me a, uh, debugger board and I interfaced it to a PC and wrote the software to make the board, uh, integrate to what was a PC.
00:57:59
Speaker
Uh, Williams was using a VAC 750 at the time, um, to develop their games.
00:58:08
Speaker
And, um,
00:58:10
Speaker
So Pat and I, you know, Pat finished his job at Nuva Tech, finished his bowling pin setter, left Nuva Tech, and we worked for probably nine months, maybe 12 months on this in a studio apartment that I rented when Eugene and I closed VidKids.
00:58:35
Speaker
Eugene and I did...
00:58:38
Speaker
Robitron and blaster in an office on Halstead street in Chicago.
00:58:43
Speaker
Okay.
00:58:44
Speaker
When Eugene went back to college, I took the stuff that I wanted to still be able to use to do development work and didn't have room for it in my apartment.
00:58:55
Speaker
So I rented a, I had a two bedroom apartment on the 12th floor.
00:58:58
Speaker
I rented a studio apartment on the ninth floor and had a little workshop there.
00:59:03
Speaker
And so Pat and I built bonsai built wrecking ball, which was the prototype.
00:59:09
Speaker
in that apartment.
00:59:10
Speaker
And once we got it completed, we brought in the executives from Williams.
00:59:16
Speaker
Larry Thrasher had been brought in as president of the company at the time.
00:59:21
Speaker
He came from the automotive business.
00:59:24
Speaker
And Larry and Neil Nicastro and Ken Fidesna and Joe Dillon, and I think Eugene and Steve, all from Williams came out
00:59:36
Speaker
to take a look at Wrecking Ball.
00:59:40
Speaker
And they made a deal to license it from us, and we came in-house to do the game, which would be Bonsai Run, based on that game.
00:59:50
Speaker
And Ken would later tell me that he had no interest in buying that game and didn't really care whether Williams made that game or not.
01:00:01
Speaker
but that he bought the game to get me back inside the company.
01:00:04
Speaker
Oh, really?
01:00:04
Speaker
So that was a pretty cool thing to hear.
01:00:09
Speaker
We made Bonsai Run.
01:00:10
Speaker
I'm proud of the game.
01:00:11
Speaker
I love the game.
01:00:13
Speaker
It was commercially okay and far short of any expectations that anyone had for the game.
01:00:23
Speaker
And there was never a second one.
01:00:25
Speaker
And our patent, halfway through its life, we decided not to renew it.
01:00:31
Speaker
because there was going to be no economic value to it.
01:00:35
Speaker
But now I am back inside California Avenue.
01:00:40
Speaker
They invited Pat to do, they invited Pat to work at Williams after the game, and he signed a contract and went and worked on Whirlwind, I'm sorry, Earthshaker and then Whirlwind.
01:00:55
Speaker
And at the same time, I,
01:00:57
Speaker
took the task of rewriting a whole new operating system for the next generation.
01:01:02
Speaker
Okay.
01:01:04
Speaker
And so during the year and a half that Pat did those games, I did the new operating system and we got together to do Funhaus as the first game on the new platform.
01:01:16
Speaker
And by the way, I love your shirt.
01:01:18
Speaker
For those that aren't here with me, you've got a Funhaus.
01:01:21
Speaker
It is just a picture of Funhaus from collar to belly button.
01:01:25
Speaker
It is amazing.
01:01:27
Speaker
I want to point out, because this is one game that is kind of attributed as the first game with modes.
01:01:32
Speaker
It didn't really have like a wizard mode,
01:01:35
Speaker
you work with these, you go kind of through the tasks to get the frenzy.
01:01:40
Speaker
And was that always kind of the goal, was trying to start making modes, or was it just kind of like an aha moment as you're making Funhouse?
01:01:46
Speaker
It kind of falls back to a few games before where they started doing random feature awards.
01:01:55
Speaker
Earthshaker, I think, had one.
01:01:57
Speaker
I know Whirlwind.
01:01:58
Speaker
Whirlwind definitely had one with somebody that sounded like Pat Bertram.
01:02:04
Speaker
The guy from Green Acres said, well, looky here.
01:02:10
Speaker
And so we were sort of in a setup, which was actually backing up to space shuttle.
01:02:19
Speaker
Okay.
01:02:27
Speaker
Okay, backing up the space shuttle.
01:02:29
Speaker
Space shuttle, we had, you spelled out S-H-U-T-T-L-E on the six stand-up targets and the drop target in the middle.
01:02:40
Speaker
And you won an award, which was a special and extra ball, lots of points, less, less, less, less points.
01:02:48
Speaker
And then that feature got changed by a very hard-to-make shot so that once it was set, you could work on it.
01:02:59
Speaker
And in space shuttle, if you got to the last ball and you, and you were having a really pathetic game, I would randomly like the extra ball for the feature.
01:03:11
Speaker
I think every ball, it picked a random, a random, it would go to, to, to, to.
01:03:18
Speaker
And it would go boom, boom, boom for extra ball.
01:03:22
Speaker
Our German distributor, Nova Operate run by a,
01:03:27
Speaker
guy that really was critical to the success of Williams.
01:03:34
Speaker
His name's Hans Rosenzweig and he died recently.
01:03:40
Speaker
But he, he would handicap our games.
01:03:44
Speaker
And when he loved the game, okay, he would write a big order.
01:03:48
Speaker
The line would start producing for Germany while they're testing here to get our, our,
01:03:55
Speaker
less aggressive distributors to take quantities of the games.
01:04:00
Speaker
Okay.
01:04:03
Speaker
And so the factory would run making these games and we had to, we had to six weeks from the end of production at whatever rate we're going, we had to either buy more parts.
01:04:13
Speaker
Okay.
01:04:13
Speaker
Or decide production was over.
01:04:16
Speaker
And Hans, if he loved the game, he would always speculate on the games.
01:04:21
Speaker
Our local distributors were not as aggressive.
01:04:24
Speaker
They felt that, you know, if they ordered too many, they're going to get stuck with them.
01:04:30
Speaker
Then they're going to lose money closing them out.
01:04:33
Speaker
And closing out tends to lead to a downtrend as your customers now stop buying from you, forcing you to close out the next model.
01:04:42
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:43
Speaker
So it was a bad...
01:04:45
Speaker
a bad word in the business.
01:04:49
Speaker
Hans embraced that extra ball feature that after Space Shuttle, every game had to have it where it would give the lesser player more time.
01:05:05
Speaker
And it was a battle we fought in pinball because of the replay.
01:05:10
Speaker
Because of the replay that a good player
01:05:13
Speaker
could play forever and not pay.
01:05:16
Speaker
We were always trying to balance making the game enough there.
01:05:23
Speaker
Um, but not let the good player be able to run with it and, and replay boost eventually conquered the big player where the replay score would start going up.
01:05:34
Speaker
Um,
01:05:35
Speaker
But until we started using that mechanism, oh, by the way, alphanumeric displays can now let you change the replay score in the computer, not the operator.
01:05:46
Speaker
And Steve and I developed automatic replay percentaging on high speed, which the game would set the replay based on the overall quality of the players.
01:06:02
Speaker
But back to Hans and me.
01:06:07
Speaker
the extra ball, the pity, they were called pity extra balls.
01:06:13
Speaker
And it also, every game starting with Earthshaker or Whirlwind had to have a randomized feature that could deliver that.
01:06:23
Speaker
which became lovingly inside the company called stupid German feature.
01:06:29
Speaker
So such as what's your, you know, which whole, which shot is your stupid German feature?
01:06:35
Speaker
Yeah.
01:06:38
Speaker
But fun houses, stupid German feature was a mystery mirror.
01:06:45
Speaker
Okay.
01:06:46
Speaker
And, um,
01:06:50
Speaker
I don't think we ever lit the extra ball on it, by the way.
01:06:54
Speaker
I was, I was, um, every other one after it did.
01:07:00
Speaker
Um, I, I was, I was always trying, you know, holding the line of trying not to cheapen the games.
01:07:10
Speaker
And so, um, that brings us to grace period, right?
01:07:16
Speaker
Yeah.
01:07:17
Speaker
Um, I invented the grace period.
01:07:19
Speaker
on a shot where when the shot is lit and you shoot it while it's lit, if the light happens to go out, okay, you're still gonna get credit for that shot.
01:07:28
Speaker
And you know, when you turn the light out, you start a timer.
01:07:31
Speaker
Even though the light's not on, if the timer's still running, okay, you get credit for it.
01:07:39
Speaker
And the first free ball because you didn't do anything was flight insurance.
01:07:49
Speaker
No, actually flight insurance was the first bozo.
01:07:54
Speaker
We're going to, we're going to not let your ball in because you were bad.
01:07:59
Speaker
And F-14 only did it on the third ball.
01:08:03
Speaker
If you were having a bad game, kind of like the, the lighting, the extra ball on the third ball.
01:08:08
Speaker
Yeah.
01:08:12
Speaker
And, and, you know,
01:08:16
Speaker
It worked okay on F-14, and somewhere some of the programmers started doing that on every ball of every game.
01:08:22
Speaker
If you had a bad ball, we're going to give it back to you.
01:08:27
Speaker
That didn't help the bad players very much, but it helped the good players when they had a bad ball, and they got to have three good balls per game instead of three balls however they went.
01:08:41
Speaker
And I was on the, the, this is ruining pinball side of it because I was always, you were trying to make a game for everybody.
01:08:50
Speaker
We're trying to walk the line where we put it right where it needs to be.
01:08:55
Speaker
And this really messed it up.
01:08:58
Speaker
And it caused a psychology of every, every,
01:09:03
Speaker
Everybody wanted to blame the game for everything.
01:09:05
Speaker
So anytime the game did something bad to you, it said, no, no, you can have the ball back.
01:09:10
Speaker
And the second revision of F-14, when Yagov would kick it right through the flippers, it would give you the ball back.
01:09:19
Speaker
The same thing that, you know, the game did something and you weren't, you know, maybe...
01:09:26
Speaker
Maybe you weren't up to it.
01:09:27
Speaker
And our games evolve from electromechanical games where you played a ball for 20 to 30 seconds to where, you know, you're playing balls for minutes.
01:09:38
Speaker
Okay.
01:09:38
Speaker
And we can only raise our price, which is where this story started by making them make more money in a location, taking quarters.
01:09:49
Speaker
And as the game time goes up, the amount in the cash box goes down.
01:09:54
Speaker
So I'm trying to walk the line and Adam's family had no ball saver.
01:09:59
Speaker
Um, I think they put one in Adam's family gold.
01:10:02
Speaker
Okay.
01:10:03
Speaker
Um, twilight zone had no ball saver and by world cup, which was the next game I worked on.
01:10:12
Speaker
You had to have a ball saver.
01:10:14
Speaker
I lost the war.
01:10:16
Speaker
Which is funny because like you look at Adam's family and twilight zone, like twilight.
01:10:21
Speaker
The first thing that comes to mind is like,
01:10:23
Speaker
you're not safe whatsoever on the first plunge.
01:10:26
Speaker
It, you either shoot it into the pops or it comes right to your flipper, whereas the world cup, it's coming right to your flipper regardless.
01:10:33
Speaker
On the plunge.
01:10:33
Speaker
So that's kind of funny.
01:10:34
Speaker
It should have almost been reversed, but yeah.
01:10:37
Speaker
Well, it was, it wasn't thought out in those terms.
01:10:41
Speaker
I, I, you know, part of the, let everybody do their thing at Williams for better or worse is
01:10:51
Speaker
there weren't strictly imposed standards.
01:10:54
Speaker
Okay.
01:10:55
Speaker
If I was running engineering in the early nineties, I probably would have made standards of what we needed to do.
01:11:04
Speaker
The better part is people do better stuff when they're not constrained and they can dream up other things.
01:11:11
Speaker
The bad part is
01:11:13
Speaker
We had a faction at Williams that, you know, wanted to protect the player from everything, which sadly I started.
01:11:24
Speaker
Space shuttle, you roll halfway up the ramp and come down, it pops the pose to keep the ball from going down the middle.
01:11:31
Speaker
So that started a terrible trend of game designers don't have to fix things that make their games play badly.
01:11:40
Speaker
We'll fix it in software.
01:11:42
Speaker
Okay.
01:11:43
Speaker
All right.
01:11:44
Speaker
And there are all, every game today is fixing every unfair thing and giving you balls back because, you know, we're kind and gentle in pinball.
01:11:59
Speaker
And in somebody's basement, we don't care how many minutes you sit on the machine.
01:12:03
Speaker
Yeah.
01:12:04
Speaker
Okay.
01:12:05
Speaker
It's totally changed.
01:12:08
Speaker
And it's really funny because I play some of these new games and I can't play them.
01:12:14
Speaker
I knew every game and I was good at every game and I learned every game and it dawned on me.
01:12:20
Speaker
These aren't three minute experience.
01:12:22
Speaker
These games are not designed to be three minute experiences that are good, medium or bad and extend to five, six, eight, 10 minutes when you rock it.
01:12:33
Speaker
And so there's been this, this incredible evolution over the years into the, you know, what we need to make people love them in their homes.
01:12:44
Speaker
Um, and, and all this kindler, gentler stuff is okay because replays, you know, if they're there or not, they're not costing anybody anything and time on devices and that thing.
01:12:56
Speaker
And these guys have figured out how to get margin, um, which didn't exist in my day and caused all kinds of things that we had to do that, that we, they don't have to do now and are a great reason
01:13:13
Speaker
that these games are so amazingly amazing and wonderful.
01:13:18
Speaker
So you touched on a game that is iconic in its own right.
The Complexity of Twilight Zone and Beyond
01:13:21
Speaker
Adam's family.
01:13:24
Speaker
That was the first game.
01:13:25
Speaker
If I remember correctly, actually had modes that led to a wizard mode to tour the mansion.
01:13:31
Speaker
Where did that all come about?
01:13:33
Speaker
And would you ever expected it to made, you know, it's like 22, 23,000 units with gold.
01:13:38
Speaker
Like was,
01:13:40
Speaker
was the hype real there or was it just like we're, we're making this because that's what we've been told to do.
01:13:46
Speaker
It's, it's great to look at, to dissect that.
01:13:51
Speaker
Um, we were Williams.
01:13:56
Speaker
Okay.
01:13:56
Speaker
And Williams kicked ass.
01:13:58
Speaker
Okay.
01:13:59
Speaker
And drove Valley down to, to, to very low levels and drove, uh,
01:14:08
Speaker
That's a value.
01:14:09
Speaker
Joe Gottlieb down to very low levels and then resulted in Bali abandoning the business and, and letting our management by the pinball and video game units of Bali for less than the parts they had an inventory.
01:14:28
Speaker
So when Williams bought Bali, all they had to do is make enough games to liquidate the parts in the pinball machines.
01:14:37
Speaker
Okay.
01:14:37
Speaker
And they had Bally for free.
01:14:39
Speaker
Wow.
01:14:41
Speaker
Um, but Bally at the time we bought them was a second tier pinball company.
01:14:48
Speaker
We, we were, we were all over them.
01:14:52
Speaker
Um, you know, with our run in the early, um, nineties that we're talking about, you know, we, we, we, we kind of, uh, buried them and they came in and, and
01:15:06
Speaker
Um, we, some of the belly engineering team came in, Jim Patley came in with the purchase, which was awesome.
01:15:12
Speaker
Jim is a great designer.
01:15:13
Speaker
He brought a lot of know-how and later on they moved me up into management and Jim was my right hand man.
01:15:21
Speaker
He was out there doing it all.
01:15:23
Speaker
And I worked with him to run the division.
01:15:27
Speaker
Um, the belly crew that they bought in did some belly titles, moved all the hardware.
01:15:37
Speaker
And Neil decided it was time to rebuild the Bally brand.
01:15:46
Speaker
And so Pat, we've licensed Adams Family.
01:15:49
Speaker
Roger Sharp got the license for us.
01:15:52
Speaker
Pat, you're going to do the game, and you're going to do it under the Bally banner.
01:15:57
Speaker
And I'm telling you, this was a black, dark day in the life of the Adams Family design team.
01:16:07
Speaker
Because we really, I will tell you, we thought if we do the best game we've ever done, it'll probably sell 10,000 units.
01:16:16
Speaker
Okay.
01:16:17
Speaker
Because you just, we just can't get that much mileage with the game with the belly moniker on it.
01:16:25
Speaker
Okay.
01:16:30
Speaker
Pat created thing.
01:16:33
Speaker
which was, you know, great thing in the bookcase, which, you know, the bookcase came right out of the movie.
01:16:41
Speaker
Thing is so elemental to Adam's family that it had to be there.
01:16:47
Speaker
And we were working on the game with a set of rules.
01:16:52
Speaker
And like high speed, as we were working, we could not get the game
01:17:00
Speaker
to have the right balance and mix of everything.
01:17:03
Speaker
And high speed went through this, this stage where Steve and I were yelling at each other and not talking to each other.
01:17:11
Speaker
And, um, you know, we, we, we had some, uh, some, some executive therapists come work with us to, to keep things on track.
01:17:23
Speaker
And we eventually got there.
01:17:26
Speaker
Um, and Adam's family was the same way.
01:17:28
Speaker
And Adam's family was,
01:17:30
Speaker
had an early milestone of having a showable game ready for the premiere of the movie, which was in Los Angeles.
01:17:38
Speaker
Okay.
01:17:40
Speaker
And we had gotten to the game to this point.
01:17:42
Speaker
We had gotten to the game to this point where we had a full game, full art, everything on it.
01:17:48
Speaker
And the rules and software were okay.
01:17:52
Speaker
Okay.
01:17:53
Speaker
They were, you know, and they were fine to bring it to a movie premiere and show people for the first time.
01:18:00
Speaker
Yeah.
01:18:01
Speaker
But we didn't, Thing was in the game way too much.
01:18:08
Speaker
And it just was a long, slow mechanism.
01:18:12
Speaker
And we just didn't have it.
01:18:14
Speaker
And Roger Sharp will tell you the story because Roger, you know, was the licensing guy who got the license and was a point person.
01:18:23
Speaker
And we went to LA.
01:18:24
Speaker
We were on the Rick Dees radio show from six to 10 in the morning.
01:18:30
Speaker
And Hammer was there.
01:18:33
Speaker
MC Hammer, the Addams Family theme.
01:18:37
Speaker
He was, you know, he was there and it was a great brush with greatness.
01:18:42
Speaker
And we showed the game there.
01:18:44
Speaker
And again, it was, you know, we weren't going to fulfill the 10,000 game plan.
01:18:51
Speaker
prophecy, and we just kept working at it.
01:18:57
Speaker
And again, there was a lot of friction.
01:19:01
Speaker
There was a lot of friction.
01:19:06
Speaker
There was a lot of friction between the designers and the programmers often, often, just because partially the designers grew out of being
01:19:20
Speaker
the producers, you know, video games have a producer.
01:19:22
Speaker
There's a programmer, there's an artist, there's whatever.
01:19:25
Speaker
The designers were the, created the design and the ideas and were the producer.
01:19:30
Speaker
They, they had the view and were in control of everything that happened.
01:19:36
Speaker
And the programmers, you know, pre Eugene, actually pre Randy Pfeiffer, Randy Pfeiffer did the first Williams system and did flash.
01:19:46
Speaker
Okay.
01:19:47
Speaker
And, um,
01:19:49
Speaker
And he was a guy, you know, that, that was going to do more indifferent because the realm of what was being done wasn't known when Randy did flash or when Eugene did firepower or when I did high speed.
01:20:07
Speaker
Um, and so there was friction between Pat and I at that time.
01:20:14
Speaker
And, and Pat and I,
01:20:15
Speaker
had less friction than other design teams.
01:20:19
Speaker
And we did four consecutive, for me, it was four consecutive games with Pat.
01:20:24
Speaker
Um, although he did two between Bonsai Run and Funhouse.
01:20:29
Speaker
Um, but we were, we were just struggling and we just kept on moving the pieces and moving the pieces and finally, you know, created a great game.
01:20:41
Speaker
Um, but it was, um,
01:20:44
Speaker
we were saddled with Bally.
01:20:46
Speaker
We had a game that just wasn't cutting it maybe a month before it had to be finished.
01:20:52
Speaker
And the rest is history after we worked it out.
01:20:56
Speaker
And again, once we started putting it out and it was making $400 a week in 1980, 92.
01:21:02
Speaker
And it
01:21:09
Speaker
and eighth week, ninth week, 10th week, 11th week, it's making $400 a week at a particular arcade.
01:21:15
Speaker
Um, boy, we knew we were onto something, you know, this was, this was the players weren't letting it go at the level that they would, they were contending to be on the machine.
01:21:29
Speaker
And, um, you know,
01:21:33
Speaker
It got near the record and our friend Hans Rosenzweig in Germany went and bought enough games to get from whatever they had sold to be just one over the record of eight ball, which was 20, 20, 230.
01:21:49
Speaker
Okay.
01:21:49
Speaker
And so the original run was 20, 231.
01:21:50
Speaker
And then there were a thousand gold games made.
01:22:01
Speaker
like a lot of games that both runs could have run longer, but we had the six week rule.
01:22:07
Speaker
Yeah.
01:22:07
Speaker
And the gold was one of the first times a six week rule was ever broken where they restarted a game to make a thousand games, made it a premium, you know, you know, was the glimpse of what they're all doing now where we'll make a nicer game.
01:22:24
Speaker
And it was really just superficially nicer.
01:22:30
Speaker
And we'll charge more money and we'll put numbered plates on it and make a big deal out of it.
01:22:37
Speaker
So that was that.
01:22:38
Speaker
That's awesome.
01:22:39
Speaker
And then you guys then went into Twilight Zone, which was a great follow-up to Adam's family.
01:22:47
Speaker
I guess, how did that one come about?
01:22:48
Speaker
All right.
01:22:50
Speaker
What did I say at the top of this?
01:22:51
Speaker
Designers are insecure?
01:22:53
Speaker
Hat?
01:22:55
Speaker
He felt he needed some new innovation and that innovation for Twilight Zone.
01:23:03
Speaker
Initially, before the other things like the gumball machine and the Powerball, that innovation was we're going to make the games bigger.
01:23:11
Speaker
You know, it's not going to be that wide body size.
01:23:15
Speaker
It's going to be a size in between, which was, I think, with Big Game and Cheetah, the Stern game.
01:23:22
Speaker
No, Big Game was big.
01:23:23
Speaker
It was Cheetah that went to the Twilight Zone size.
01:23:27
Speaker
Big Game was Big Game.
01:23:32
Speaker
And so, you know, he did that.
01:23:35
Speaker
And all of a sudden, we're back in the margin.
01:23:38
Speaker
You know, if you make a game with...
01:23:40
Speaker
two more square feet, you're going to shovel two more square feet of stuff on the game.
01:23:47
Speaker
Um, and so we went to work on that project.
01:23:54
Speaker
Um, it's a game.
01:23:55
Speaker
It's the most frustrating pinball machine I ever worked on.
01:24:00
Speaker
Not because it was difficult.
01:24:03
Speaker
Um, although it was, and there are modes where you can trick the game into thinking there's a power ball there when it's not, uh,
01:24:10
Speaker
Um, but because we could not get the left side drain, had the bumpers in the drain on the left side.
01:24:23
Speaker
We could not get that to work right.
01:24:25
Speaker
It was either too liberal.
01:24:29
Speaker
We closed it off.
01:24:30
Speaker
We closed it off.
01:24:31
Speaker
I think when we initially did it in the good players, you know,
01:24:38
Speaker
we're destroying it top to bottom and we opened it up and tried to adjust it and Pat tried to put rubber here and there and everywhere.
01:24:47
Speaker
And when it was open up, it was a really mean, vicious game.
01:24:53
Speaker
And for great pinball, it's finding that balance.
01:24:56
Speaker
Twilight Zone to make money in an arcade or a bar was not a great pinball.
01:25:04
Speaker
But to the collecting community,
01:25:07
Speaker
It shows when you take a shovel and start shoveling components and features and things into a game that, boy, are they going to want to have that game.
01:25:19
Speaker
And it's a, you know, it's a glimpse at where we are now.
01:25:28
Speaker
But I, you know, I, I had one of every one of my games when I downsized
01:25:35
Speaker
I got rid of some of them.
01:25:37
Speaker
And then when I moved to an apartment, I got rid of almost all the rest of them.
01:25:42
Speaker
And I did not hug Twilight Zone out the door.
01:25:48
Speaker
It is so revered in this community.
01:25:50
Speaker
And it's a game that I just, you know, I just am so frustrated.
01:25:57
Speaker
We could never get it right.
01:25:58
Speaker
You know, it was...
01:26:02
Speaker
It wasn't what it was supposed to be.
01:26:04
Speaker
It was supposed to be better than Addams Family.
01:26:08
Speaker
And it was... Again, we couldn't get it where it made a lot of money, and that was our job.
01:26:15
Speaker
Not to make collectors go, we love your game.
01:26:18
Speaker
Our job was to make games that make lots of money and sell lots of games.
01:26:22
Speaker
Which is funny, because some people revere Twilight Zone way above Addams, and it just...
01:26:28
Speaker
Between that and it's, it sold 15,000 units.
01:26:32
Speaker
It was very, very respectable.
01:26:33
Speaker
And again, the last couple of thousand were overshoot because of the height, which were maybe not closed out, but, but squeezed out slowly and painfully because the market didn't want to, um,
01:26:51
Speaker
And I'm approached by collectors who talk about Twilight Zone and want me to sign a flyer or their lower arch or their back class.
01:27:00
Speaker
And I don't say to a single one of them that, you know, I'm glad you love it.
01:27:09
Speaker
I'm happy to support you and it.
01:27:11
Speaker
But I just cringe every time I think about that game.
01:27:17
Speaker
So after Twilight, you kind of stopped.
01:27:19
Speaker
So at least on Pinside, it said that you did World Cup soccer and you did Jackpot.
01:27:24
Speaker
And that was kind of the last couple of games you did for Williams Valley.
01:27:27
Speaker
And then what did your role transition to while you were there?
01:27:30
Speaker
Okay.
01:27:32
Speaker
World Cup was a game being developed by John Papaduke.
01:27:38
Speaker
I think Jack Scalin did the mechanicals on it.
01:27:42
Speaker
Matt Coriel was the programmer.
01:27:46
Speaker
I think Kevin O'Connor did the art.
01:27:50
Speaker
Um, that was a team that I was not a part of.
01:27:53
Speaker
Okay.
01:27:54
Speaker
Um, and they had a working white wood and John's John Papa Duke's father got deathly ill.
01:28:05
Speaker
And John left the project in the company to tend to his father.
01:28:11
Speaker
Um, and, um,
01:28:16
Speaker
So Matt asked if I would come in and help him with the software and if I could help work the rules of the game.
01:28:30
Speaker
And I sort of came in.
01:28:33
Speaker
Jim Patla, again, was there, so he was probably the game design lead on it.
01:28:44
Speaker
Um, as far as making, doing all the things that game designer has to do to work with the mechanical guys, get the parts made, get it through the system, publish the drawings.
01:28:56
Speaker
Um, and I kind of came in as, uh, as lead programmer working with Matt and co-designer, um, where John had a, had a, had a, had a great layout.
01:29:12
Speaker
Okay.
01:29:13
Speaker
I didn't change a thing in the layout except that the ramp that came around from the lock mechanism had a plastic ramp that went behind the flippers and came back and dumped the ball by the right flipper.
01:29:31
Speaker
I think it comes out on the left flipper.
01:29:33
Speaker
Is it kind of like Blackwater 500?
01:29:35
Speaker
And the ramp was positioned.
01:29:43
Speaker
So that when you try to reach in to lift up the, the lower arch to lift up the play field, you got this plastic ramp and had to worry about breaking it.
01:29:53
Speaker
Yeah.
01:29:55
Speaker
And so the only change that Jim and I made to the play field was just cutting the ramp and delivering it to the left flipper.
01:30:06
Speaker
And then.
01:30:10
Speaker
We took some of the rules that he had in there, and Matt and I really created mostly a new set of rules.
01:30:19
Speaker
I think we kept the multiball rules, which would lock the balls up in the ramp on the left side.
01:30:27
Speaker
And then it would light final draw to start multiball, and then it would start multiball.
01:30:34
Speaker
And I don't remember if they had an objective or not.
01:30:38
Speaker
It's shoot ramp.
01:30:40
Speaker
then shoot goal, shoot ramp and shoot goal.
01:30:42
Speaker
That's the, those are the rules.
01:30:44
Speaker
Oh, that's what you did.
01:30:44
Speaker
Okay.
01:30:45
Speaker
I'm not sure what John had there.
01:30:47
Speaker
Okay.
01:30:48
Speaker
Um, but we, we ended and, and, and, and we made everything being about all the, get hitting the ball and the goal and getting excited.
01:31:00
Speaker
World cup is the game.
01:31:02
Speaker
If when anyone says I want to put a pinball in my basement,
01:31:06
Speaker
I tell them, find an old World Cup.
01:31:08
Speaker
That's the game I would recommend.
01:31:09
Speaker
And I had two or three of them, and they are still in my friend's basements because that is such an instant gratification game.
01:31:20
Speaker
You're flipping the balls without skill, and they're going up the middle mostly.
01:31:24
Speaker
And it's scoring goals, and the crowd's cheering, and the announcer's announcing.
01:31:29
Speaker
Tim Kittsrow did an amazing job on vocals on that.
01:31:33
Speaker
and we worked with Tim on those vocals and he, he was amazing.
01:31:37
Speaker
And I'm really, really sad.
01:31:40
Speaker
I ran into him at an event somewhere recently and introduced myself, you know, Larry DeMaria, I work with around the world.
01:31:49
Speaker
He doesn't even remember working on that game.
01:31:51
Speaker
Really?
01:31:51
Speaker
He does not remember working on that game.
01:31:54
Speaker
You know, uh, of course, um,
01:31:58
Speaker
You know, he's legendary for the Midway sports games, but he does not remember.
01:32:04
Speaker
And he did.
01:32:05
Speaker
He killed it.
01:32:06
Speaker
Yeah, he killed it.
01:32:07
Speaker
And then again, Matt and I had to do magic to to make it sound like an announcer, not sound like Max Headroom.
01:32:17
Speaker
Yeah.
01:32:18
Speaker
Which is kind of what happens when you start just firing off speech calls.
01:32:24
Speaker
But it was it was a great, great team effort.
01:32:28
Speaker
And, yeah, Kevin did the back glass.
01:32:31
Speaker
It's beautiful.
01:32:36
Speaker
We made Striker, their mascot, into a star, which FIFO didn't do.
01:32:40
Speaker
Yeah.
01:32:43
Speaker
was it FIFA?
01:32:45
Speaker
FIFA didn't make striker into a star they created him they gave us all of the material ahead of the World Cup as far as a style guide we used him he was lovable, huggable and it's really funny that he was not a brand he was not relevant nobody would associate looking at that image with World Cup soccer but but
01:33:14
Speaker
The exact antithesis of Twilight Zone.
01:33:19
Speaker
It didn't have the commercial success of some of the biggest games, but I love how that game came out.
01:33:28
Speaker
And again, I can't take anything away from John.
01:33:31
Speaker
It's his masterpiece, but I got to paint a few brush strokes in there as we went through it.
01:33:38
Speaker
And it's a great game.
01:33:39
Speaker
I still own that game.
01:33:39
Speaker
When you talk about friends having that still in their basement...
01:33:42
Speaker
My wife's like, you're never getting rid of that game.
01:33:45
Speaker
I think it does everything for not only the beginner, but it also does it for the expert.
01:33:51
Speaker
It's a deep, challenging game.
01:33:55
Speaker
And it's got the perfect wizard mode.
01:34:01
Speaker
I love that.
01:34:02
Speaker
Going up against Germany and finally dumping all the balls on and just attacking and attacking.
01:34:08
Speaker
There's no other wizard mode like it, and it's amazing.
01:34:11
Speaker
Now, if anybody knows and has the home ROMs, which certainly you can find, they're out there.
01:34:18
Speaker
If you push and hold the buy-in button, anytime during the game, you push and hold the buy-in button, it will go into the wizard mode.
01:34:27
Speaker
Oh, really?
01:34:27
Speaker
I didn't know that.
01:34:28
Speaker
Yeah.
01:34:29
Speaker
You have to have the home ROMs.
01:34:30
Speaker
Do you have the home ROMs?
01:34:32
Speaker
I don't think I do.
01:34:33
Speaker
I'm going to have to find them.
01:34:35
Speaker
I might know a guy.
01:34:38
Speaker
But with the home rems installed, you can push and hold the buying button.
01:34:42
Speaker
Same thing for Twilight Zone's Lost in the Zone.
01:34:47
Speaker
Same thing for Adam's Family Tour of the Mansion.
01:34:51
Speaker
I didn't know any of this.
01:34:51
Speaker
This is the first time I've ever heard this.
01:34:53
Speaker
I've been doing this for a decade.
01:34:54
Speaker
Okay, well, I made home rems for all these games, and it wasn't for wide distribution, and we didn't.
01:35:01
Speaker
you know, early on, there was no, no free information exchange over the internet.
01:35:06
Speaker
Although there was our GP on, on Usenet.
01:35:11
Speaker
It was a Usenet group that, that had a lot of us interacting and ended up recruiting people into our companies.
01:35:20
Speaker
Um, Duncan Brown came to us definitely, you know, through the Usenet group.
01:35:27
Speaker
Um, um,
01:35:37
Speaker
Kevin Martin.
01:35:39
Speaker
Okay.
01:35:39
Speaker
Kevin Martin.
01:35:42
Speaker
When Kevin was on RGP, he was an RGP busybody.
01:35:48
Speaker
He literally responded to every post anybody made and lowered the quality of that group by three runs.
01:35:57
Speaker
He ended up working at Data East as a result of a Data East pinball and confessed that his behavior was solely to get the job in the business.
01:36:08
Speaker
So we exchanged stuff like that, but I'm sure the home runs for all those games are out there.
01:36:16
Speaker
And they should each have a start the wizard mode by holding in the button.
01:36:22
Speaker
And they all clear your scores at the end of the wizard modes so that, you know, it doesn't get you anywhere for high score purposes.
01:36:32
Speaker
That's awesome.
01:36:33
Speaker
That's a tidbit for your listeners.
01:36:35
Speaker
That's great.
01:36:36
Speaker
That's great.
01:36:37
Speaker
So what ended up happening, because you were still at Williams until they closed the doors, correct?
01:36:44
Speaker
Ish?
01:36:45
Speaker
Let's say that.
01:36:46
Speaker
Okay, okay.
01:36:47
Speaker
Let's say that.
01:36:48
Speaker
I actually left Labor Day and they closed on October 25th.
01:36:53
Speaker
So you were there pretty much up to the end.
01:36:57
Speaker
We're talking days, a couple of months.
01:37:01
Speaker
So what did your role become after Jackpot?
01:37:03
Speaker
Were you kind of just overseeing people or?
01:37:06
Speaker
Actually, before Jackpot, I was put as director of engineering.
01:37:11
Speaker
So I had everybody doing work on pinball, mechanical, sound, electrical, game design, software, the quality control, the manuals, technical writing was all one group under me.
01:37:35
Speaker
And Jim Patlow was at my side running that group.
01:37:40
Speaker
The game jackpot came to be because we hit a point where there was going to be a perceived hole in production.
01:37:50
Speaker
It's a recurring theme.
01:37:51
Speaker
Yep.
01:37:54
Speaker
No Fear was delayed and No Fear was going to miss its targeted date.
01:38:01
Speaker
And three or four months, Jim was waving red flags that we have to do something to fill the hole in production.
01:38:10
Speaker
And so I suggested, well, there's two things.
01:38:14
Speaker
One is we had a hole in production.
01:38:16
Speaker
Two, we were losing our audience.
01:38:19
Speaker
Okay, the games had and were evolving and were so involved that the beginner players were totally not staying or playing.
01:38:36
Speaker
And so we needed a new game.
01:38:38
Speaker
My concept was let's take an old, let's take the only thing we can make in time, kind of like Super Defender.
01:38:45
Speaker
The only thing we can make in three or four months is a game that's done.
01:38:49
Speaker
So let's re skin a game.
01:38:52
Speaker
And I picked pin bot, which would become jackpot with the notion is it's got this bank of five targets in the middle and a flailing player is going to just hit them.
01:39:03
Speaker
And as long as I make good stuff happen up the middle, maybe I can, can get newer people to hang onto the game.
01:39:10
Speaker
Yeah.
01:39:12
Speaker
And so, uh, the jackpot rules were so much kinder and gentler.
01:39:18
Speaker
Any five shots on either bank would give you the five entire columns to open the visor, let you shoot up the middle to start multiball.
01:39:29
Speaker
And then we built a game around it, around gambling.
01:39:36
Speaker
And it was a real interesting segue because I started using gambling probability math concepts to
01:39:46
Speaker
in the features that were gambling features and in casino run, which was the wizard mode of the game.
01:39:53
Speaker
Well, it was one of the wizard modes of the game.
01:39:56
Speaker
Again, casino run was, was four features completed to get casino run.
01:40:01
Speaker
So it was not tour the mansion or lost in the zone or final match.
01:40:07
Speaker
Real regular people with a good game could get the casino run.
01:40:11
Speaker
And then there was mega visor, which was the real wizard feature.
01:40:17
Speaker
in jackpot.
01:40:19
Speaker
And I was, um, I would work all day in my management role.
01:40:24
Speaker
And then at six o'clock, everyone went home and I worked from six till 12, one, two, whatever programming jackpot.
01:40:32
Speaker
Um, and, uh, you know, we did the game.
01:40:35
Speaker
I, I, it's a game I like, I'm happy with, um, didn't sell a lot of games.
01:40:41
Speaker
And, uh, you know, we were, we were,
01:40:47
Speaker
Clearly in that period, clearly in that period of declining sales where, you know, world cup, I think was probably seven or 8,000 jackpot was, you know, three or 4,000.
01:41:01
Speaker
No fear was about the same.
01:41:02
Speaker
And, and, uh, it, it went down from there.
01:41:07
Speaker
So, um,
01:41:11
Speaker
I don't know if it achieved the objective of getting weaker players to want to play pinball.
01:41:18
Speaker
Um, but it was a game that was really liked by the really good players.
01:41:23
Speaker
Yeah.
01:41:24
Speaker
Um, for the, for the difficult side of the game, especially those super Jack bots too.
01:41:30
Speaker
And some of the quirkiness a little bit to the rules of locking certain balls, a certain wing and getting double jet super Jack bots.
01:41:37
Speaker
Yeah.
01:41:38
Speaker
And again, uh,
01:41:42
Speaker
I'm a player.
01:41:43
Speaker
So I'm, you know, a lot of the things we come up with are you do something cool and don't get rewarded.
01:41:48
Speaker
You go, let's, let's reward that.
01:41:50
Speaker
Yeah.
01:41:51
Speaker
And, um, and so features like that come about that way.
01:41:56
Speaker
Um, so what made you decide, I, you know, there was, I know when Williams closed, it kind of was like resetting the clock.
From Pinball to Slot Machines
01:42:06
Speaker
They kind of said, Hey, if you want to work in slots, you're gonna have to start back at square one with us.
01:42:12
Speaker
I know Stern was kind of taking their pick of the crop.
01:42:15
Speaker
What made you decide to just not keep going with pinball?
01:42:26
Speaker
It really turned out to be what happened when they closed pinball.
01:42:33
Speaker
From 1996 to 98,
01:42:38
Speaker
I was working over slots and pinball and I was learning how to make cool slot machines with some of the old pinball guys who, you know, we, we laid off people, we downsize.
01:42:52
Speaker
So some of the people that were doing pinballs in my department, we moved over and they were working, making new kinds of slots.
01:43:01
Speaker
Um, and in night show, show, I, I,
01:43:07
Speaker
I had a background in slots in 99 when they fired everybody from pinball.
01:43:15
Speaker
Okay.
01:43:16
Speaker
They fired all these guys that were brilliantly talented people like Scott Slomiani, Duncan Brown, Al Thomas, Ben Gomez.
01:43:28
Speaker
Um, and I couldn't ever,
01:43:33
Speaker
hire them to work for me because of non-solicitation agreements that I had as a manager of the company.
01:43:41
Speaker
Okay.
01:43:41
Speaker
So under no circumstances could I try and go do what Eugene and I did with the people that were working for me.
01:43:50
Speaker
And so Al, of course, Al Thomas, I could do another podcast twice as long talking about Al Thomas.
01:43:58
Speaker
He's brilliant.
01:44:00
Speaker
He's crazy.
01:44:02
Speaker
He's a great guy, and he was all over me.
01:44:10
Speaker
You know, we got to start a company.
01:44:11
Speaker
Because Al was working.
01:44:14
Speaker
Al was still in gaming, as was Ben.
01:44:18
Speaker
But, you know, he saw that he had worked with Scott and Duncan on gaming projects.
01:44:29
Speaker
and felt, you know, they could all do it.
01:44:31
Speaker
Come on, let's all start a company.
01:44:34
Speaker
And so, you know, I, I looked around there really, um, pinball Williams pinball was done.
01:44:44
Speaker
I believe Stern was not going to last real long in the way Williams had, had, had met its demise.
01:44:55
Speaker
And so I, I didn't think there was a future in pinball and Gary Stern pinball was on life support for a lot of years before anybody could conclude, you know, this is solid and this is a business.
01:45:10
Speaker
And I always, my vision is the best thing that happened to Gary Stern was Jersey Jack.
01:45:18
Speaker
Cause Jack decided we're going to shovel all the stuff in the machine and charge a high price.
01:45:24
Speaker
while Gary was still in the no profit margin mode.
01:45:29
Speaker
And once Stern changed the Jersey Jack model, everyone in pinball starts making money now.
01:45:37
Speaker
So I did not expect Stern to survive.
01:45:45
Speaker
Williams had asked me to go interview with the gaming department and, um,
01:45:53
Speaker
I ended up following the Al Thomas route and LED gaming was started with myself, Scott and Duncan.
01:46:03
Speaker
And Al and Ben decided not to join the group after all, once we got it started.
01:46:08
Speaker
And each of them came to join the company once we were on our way in making games.
01:46:15
Speaker
So we had the five of us at one point, as Al had envisioned.
01:46:20
Speaker
And then one by one, Ben and Al went back to the mothership working for WMS Gaming.
01:46:27
Speaker
And we went in a different way.
01:46:32
Speaker
So obviously things have changed.
01:46:34
Speaker
It's been 20 plus years since you've been in the industry and whatnot.
01:46:39
Speaker
Do you, seeing everything, I mean, like you said, we started this out by you were playing Godzilla, Keith's masterpiece, and seeing where pinball has come from.
01:46:48
Speaker
Do you, is there a part of you that wants to get back in it?
01:46:51
Speaker
Do you feel like you've said everything that needs to be said for pinball?
01:46:54
Speaker
I just, I feel like you're a very great asset to the industry.
01:46:59
Speaker
And I know a lot of people say, I don't know if you'll say it about yourself, but I'll say it for you.
01:47:05
Speaker
Would you ever take another opportunity to work on a pinball project?
01:47:11
Speaker
That's a question for another time.
Current Ventures and Reflection on Pinball's Future
01:47:14
Speaker
I started another company during COVID called AdsWorks.
01:47:19
Speaker
And we are supplying content to the online slot machine industry.
01:47:25
Speaker
It's legal in six States in the U S and we set up a company to deliver games like my studio with Scott and Duncan were making into those States for online gaming.
01:47:38
Speaker
And it has become, um, a significant, uh, uh, endeavor.
01:47:43
Speaker
We are doing great, but it is taking up so much time that, um,
01:47:49
Speaker
that there's no time to think about pinball.
01:47:52
Speaker
And when you're developing a game, to do it well, it's almost all immersive.
01:48:04
Speaker
When I went into management at Williams, there was a vision that I was gonna help people and add special sauce to the games.
01:48:16
Speaker
And I sprinkled a little bit of dust here and there, but I never was able to have that effect to really improve games with what I could think of or develop because I wasn't immersed into it.
01:48:35
Speaker
I had 100 people working for me and eight projects at a time going on.
01:48:41
Speaker
And there really wasn't the...
01:48:44
Speaker
the just ruminating and thinking and going over and over and over.
01:48:50
Speaker
And, you know, for me, half of the best ideas and features came when I woke up from a dream or were in the shower.
01:49:00
Speaker
Okay.
01:49:01
Speaker
And that only happens when you're immersed in something.
01:49:04
Speaker
So there's no chance now.
01:49:09
Speaker
And probably as the,
01:49:13
Speaker
my company gets on its feet to not need me as much as it does.
01:49:19
Speaker
I don't, I think the same problem comes to getting involved in pinball.
01:49:26
Speaker
I don't have the hours to, to put into it that will, that will result in really cool stuff.
01:49:34
Speaker
Okay.
01:49:34
Speaker
And I think trying to,
01:49:36
Speaker
to say, go, go to a pinball company once or twice a week and, and, you know, um, do it.
01:49:44
Speaker
And the other thing that I learned that I've been learning the hard way, because I, I, I'm a good pinball player.
01:49:52
Speaker
And most of the games that are being made today, I can't play very well.
01:49:58
Speaker
Well, we were designing games for a three minute experience and, and,
01:50:06
Speaker
You know, in three minutes, not much happens in these games.
01:50:13
Speaker
There's too many building blocks everywhere to do 25 things.
01:50:20
Speaker
That even my mind locked into the games isn't there right now.
01:50:28
Speaker
And so I enjoy watching them.
01:50:32
Speaker
I enjoy seeing them.
01:50:35
Speaker
Um, I'm hoping maybe one day I'll get to have the time to enjoy playing them again.
01:50:40
Speaker
I have fun with the nineties games.
01:50:43
Speaker
Um, I have, I have fun playing some of these games some of the time, but, uh, but it's, uh, it's been a stretch.
01:50:52
Speaker
Well, and before we started talking, you said you've downsized your collection.
01:50:55
Speaker
What's, what's the one game you've got in your collection?
01:50:58
Speaker
Um, my collection, well, I've got,
01:51:01
Speaker
A couple dozen at friends' houses.
01:51:03
Speaker
Okay.
01:51:04
Speaker
One game in my apartment is Adams Family Gold No.
01:51:08
Speaker
2.
01:51:09
Speaker
And then I have a MAME cabinet.
01:51:11
Speaker
And our grandkids play the MAME cabinet more than the Adams family.
01:51:18
Speaker
But it is great to see at Expo all the new young people playing pinball because that wasn't happening five, six years ago.
01:51:27
Speaker
I know.
01:51:27
Speaker
It's crazy.
01:51:28
Speaker
They just did the Stern Pro Circuit on Tuesday night.
01:51:31
Speaker
And it was Escher versus Jared and Escher's 20 and Jared's 19.
01:51:35
Speaker
And it's like, where are these kids coming from?
01:51:38
Speaker
But it's, it's awesome to see this passion and this love and they're playing at such a high level too.
01:51:43
Speaker
We saw Josh, Josh and Zach Sharp playing when they, when they weren't good and could barely see over the, the, uh, class.
01:51:55
Speaker
And it was the first IFPA tournament, which, um,
01:52:00
Speaker
I think Funhouse was around 1990, maybe 91, where all of a sudden Josh could play pinball.
01:52:12
Speaker
He didn't win anything or place or anything in that tournament, but I saw him have a comeback ball of 10 minutes on a game that it's like, okay, here's somebody you've got to watch.
01:52:30
Speaker
And these kids are amazing.
01:52:33
Speaker
They are.
01:52:35
Speaker
Escher, I mean, what the hell?
01:52:38
Speaker
What the hell?
01:52:41
Speaker
That's great.
01:52:42
Speaker
I think you've summed it up perfectly for a lot of us, whether you're competing or not against him.
01:52:46
Speaker
That's perfectly put.
01:52:49
Speaker
Absolutely incredible.
01:52:51
Speaker
Well, I want to thank you, Larry.
01:52:52
Speaker
I know this has been at least a year in the making.
01:52:56
Speaker
having you come on.
01:52:57
Speaker
I really appreciate you taking time.
01:52:58
Speaker
I know your schedule is super busy, but I really do thank you for coming on.
01:53:04
Speaker
Got any last thoughts before I shut off the recording?
01:53:07
Speaker
No, thank you, Josh.
01:53:09
Speaker
This was a lot more fun than I expected it to be.
01:53:13
Speaker
So thanks for staying on me to do it.
01:53:16
Speaker
Definitely.
01:53:16
Speaker
Well, like I said, thank you so much.
01:53:19
Speaker
Holy crap.
01:53:19
Speaker
That was almost two hours long.
01:53:21
Speaker
It was amazing.
01:53:21
Speaker
Every second of it.
01:53:22
Speaker
I know the sounds a little raw.
01:53:24
Speaker
I do apologize.
01:53:25
Speaker
Like I said, I was recording this off my phone via Zencaster and some corner at Expo as people
Closing Thoughts and Listener Engagement
01:53:32
Speaker
were moving around.
01:53:32
Speaker
So you're going to hear, you heard some coughing or heard some people talk in the background.
01:53:36
Speaker
I like his natural ambiance.
01:53:37
Speaker
I guess it is what it is.
01:53:39
Speaker
I'm just fooling myself.
01:53:40
Speaker
But overall, I love the interview.
01:53:42
Speaker
There are some names in here I wanted to point out.
01:53:45
Speaker
Steve Kordek.
01:53:46
Speaker
He was instrumental in the 60s and 70s.
01:53:50
Speaker
Some of his games are the most beloved that are out there.
01:53:53
Speaker
Stars and Nineball.
01:53:56
Speaker
Steve Epstein.
01:53:58
Speaker
God rest his soul.
01:53:58
Speaker
He just passed away this last couple of years.
01:54:01
Speaker
And he was very pivotal in all this as well.
01:54:05
Speaker
also with bringing pinball to New York for the Broadway arcade.
01:54:10
Speaker
He was a close friend of Roger Sharpe's.
01:54:13
Speaker
I assume you know who Roger Sharpe is.
01:54:15
Speaker
We talked about Roger Keith Elwin.
01:54:17
Speaker
It's amazing how a lot of these people tie together
01:54:20
Speaker
And you can kind of see the evolution of pinball.
01:54:22
Speaker
And it was kind of cool to hear him talk about the old guard moving into the new guard because now they're kind of the old guard and we have the new guard.
01:54:30
Speaker
That's Keith Elwin, Eric Biniere, Scott Denisi, all these wonderful people.
01:54:35
Speaker
And the future of pinball, listening, you know, talking about Escher Leskov.
01:54:42
Speaker
I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I had.
01:54:44
Speaker
It was definitely worth the two and a half year wait.
01:54:49
Speaker
For those that want our regular show, we will be back.
01:54:52
Speaker
We are aiming for this Thursday to record.
01:54:55
Speaker
And Scott will be back with me.
01:54:57
Speaker
We're going to talk everything Pinball Expo.
01:54:58
Speaker
I know you're wanting to hear about everything that happened there, but I'm going to hold off until then.
01:55:03
Speaker
I want to thank you.
01:55:04
Speaker
If you want to get a hold of us, at LoserkidPinball, for our socials, for Facebook, Instagram, for TikTok, Twitch, YouTube, all those.
01:55:15
Speaker
Twitter, X, whatever.
01:55:18
Speaker
If you would like to email us, we are loserkidpinballpodcast at gmail.com.
01:55:23
Speaker
I want to thank those that came up and talked to me on Expo and just said how much that our content means to them.
01:55:30
Speaker
Sometimes it kind of gets flung out into the internet.
01:55:32
Speaker
I see the numbers, but sometimes we don't get feedback.
01:55:35
Speaker
And honestly, lately we've been receiving a lot of feedback and I want to thank you guys for that.
01:55:40
Speaker
And gals, we have an amazing amount of women that listen to the show and I want to thank them personally because
01:55:46
Speaker
You women are helping progress pinball and evolve it.
01:55:50
Speaker
And it's amazing.
01:55:52
Speaker
It truly is.
01:55:53
Speaker
I love to see that pinball is such a diverse group of people that have come together for such a wonderful little niche thing.
01:56:04
Speaker
Like I said, thanks again for tuning in.